lost

It’s the Tennessee Philosophical Association’s annual Saturday convocation today. Time to play my hand.

Thinking this week about the fons et origo [I've been looking for an opportunity to use that expression forever!-- or at least since I used it the last time, explicating William James's claims about subjectivity being the source and origin of reality and selfhood] of personal indentity, and wondering whether “psychological continuity” is as important for that as some have contended,  I find myself inevitably, irresistibly reflecting on some of my own  past incarnations. I’ve never actually felt at risk of losing my personal identifying grip on my actual person, even while replacing many of the planks of continuous self-regard over the years, and while much of the familiar furniture of daily life has been remodeled and replaced.

But now comes the day when I find myself required to pronounce philosophical opinions in public, in the precise spatio-locale where once, long ago, I occupied myself in very different  behaviors. The person I choose to regard as continuous with myself, about two decades ago, used to roam the halls of the very building (give or take a few million dollars worth of renovation) where I’ll stand and deliver my response this afternoon. How do I know he was me? A potentially very abstract metaphysical discussion thusly promises a resonance rarely met by speakers at philosophical conference meetings.

I make no pretense of expertise in this area, and in fact find the technical language of specialists like Derek Parfit (“non-branching connectedness”) and Sidney Shoemaker (“person-stages”) quite off-putting. I do have some thoughts on the question of personal identity. Questions about thoughts, more precisely.

Again, it pleases me that a scheduling conflict has moved us out of Vanderbilt’s Furman Hall, my old grad school stomping ground, into Sarratt Student Center, my other old Vandy “missing years” stomping ground. (The “Night Manager” years weren’t missing at all, from my perspective; but they weren’t much taken up with scholarship, either.)

It’s not that I love Furman Hall less than Sarratt. Both places are seared into memory as scenes of triumph, disappoinment, boredom, excitement, anticipation… a catalog of emotions (positive, negative, and in-between), regrets, worries, and ambivalent recollections going back almost three decades. Just about everything I think I know about

my profession has deep roots in that building down the hill, and much that I once thought I knew, and much that I know I’ll never understand. I don’t know how to parse those associations in terms of core or distinctive psychology, but I’m sure that they exceed mere psychology and embrace biology, geography, sociology, and much else.

But this venue, in this building, seems to speak more directly to my own sense of personal identity, because it both is and is

not the same place I knew back then; and my relation to that place was then more self-assured than my relation to the other place.

Furman Hall hasn’t really changed a bit, superficially, while Sarratt has undergone an extreme make-over since I patrolled its halls and stairs and nooks and crannies. This very room, now a wired meeting space, then was the front section of the Game Room. A desk, often attended by a slavering grad student, was situated right about there. It was once part of my job to make regular rounds to this very spot, to retrieve a cash box full of the proceeds of an evening’s gaming by students who’d decided not to study, while decamped in front of what then passed for state-of-the-art, large screen (but non-hi def) televisions, video games, pool tables, and I forget what else.

And while Furman Hall stayed the same and Sarratt Center morphed into this, my own changes were unfurling. I was in academic limbo, not sure I’d ever finish what I’d started and not sure how much I wanted to finish it. A series of steps later, here I am: a professor of philosophy, not a Night Manager, but still emphatically myself. I am quite sure the points of continuity from there to here go well beyond mere psychology, person-stages, and  the PCT.

Other spots in this building now superimpose a facade that barely conceals the Sarratt of memory for me. The “main desk” downstairs has spun and shifted a few feet westward, walls and doors have vanished and others have materialized. But it’s all still “there,” or in here. And those ghostly places inform who I am.

In a nutshell, what I think I most want to say on this topic is this: in relation to place, and this place in particular, my identity is inseparable from the feelings of psychological continuity that relate then and now, here and there. But psychology is embodied. The physicality of this space, this place, is continuous with my own. My identity is not just a feeling or a state of mind, it’s much more palpably embodied and tangibly related than”psychological” implies.

So my first general question today is: Is the dichotomy between robust and sparse psychological continuity meant to take account of the physical referents of memory that tie us to a specific place (beneath all possible surface alterations)? and carry us literally out of our minds? How, otherwise, can we possibly answer the big question: Who are you?

My reply to that question:  I am an explorer, we are an explorer species, continuous with our own past (including but not limited to our psychological states) and with many possibilities for future roaming. Persons are very hard to lose, much harder to lose than feelings of robust or sparse bondedness with psychological states. That’s because persons attach naturally to bodies and to communities and to a species that extends back and forward in time. The connections thus open to us, via the body and its brain and its memories, and via communal and species memory, and communal and species aspiration, are legion. And, they are shared. I can’t get lost so long as I recall all of those connections. I am a part of us, and we belong to a vast pan-temporal species whose collective identity informs us all whether we realize it or not. It’s really, and quite literally, self-indulgent for a normally-healthy individual to brood about her private, personal identity.

There have in fact been many occasions in my experience, I’m sure in everyone’s, when I”d have given anything to lose the indignities and the pressing insistencies of embodied communal existence.  No chance. We’re here for the duration. Might as well go exploring.

Little Rock Nine

The distance we’ve come since the desegregation of Central High School in Little Rock , Arkansas in 1957,  is impressive. Nine brave children endured pain and humiliation beyond imagining. They just wanted to go to school. As adults they’ve continued to tell their amazing story, so perfect an illustration of what William James meant by heroism when he spoke to an earlier generation about “some of life’s ideals.”

And Younger Daughter will tell their story today, in my classroom. She and her middle school classmates are eagerly anticipating their field trip in a couple of weeks to Little Rock. I was a bit stunned to see, by show of hands, how few of my collegians had even heard of the LR9. We’ll fix that.

(40th anniversary)

Celebrate

Just for the record: I called this shot (“Yanks in six“) before the Series began. Move over, Bill James.  Celebrate, pinstripes. (Or as Joe Buck’s Dad woulda put it, “go crazy, folks, go crazy!”)

Jennifer Hecht would tell me to get out there and whoop and holler. “If you only think about it, watch it on television, or read about it in the paper, it is not enough.” Yeah, well… I was raised by stolid midwesterners, who discouraged that sort of demonstrativeness. I whoop discretely, on the inside.

(I did holler pretty good in ‘06, though, when the Cards avenged that ‘68 7th game loss to Lolich and the Tigers– the one that scarred my pre-pubescent psyche in ways I can’t begin to guess at. I guess. But I really shouldn’t complain, Cards’ fans have had more than our share of vicarious victory celebrations.)

But for sure, festive public celebration is one of the “few pragmatic routes to happiness.”  It is usually absurd, even when no inter-species suckling or naughty baked goods are involved, but it doesn’t cost very much, it can last a long while, it feels free. “Is there nakedness?” Not in my experience, I must not get invited to the right parties.

I did go to a Star Trek “con” once, not in costume and not quite free of irony. And yes, I do have a nutty “special kind of allegiance” to Monty Python. Hecht’s quite  right: immerse yourself in one of these worlds, and for the duration you can expect to feel “no shadowy worry of meaninglessness.” Isn’t that worth a bit of absurdity?

Hecht concludes with some terrific practical advice: first, free yourself of the conviction that you already know exactly how to be happy. That’s the “myth of knowing.”

“Then, in this less certain state, start sketching out your happiness lists. Start with writing things you actually do; then make additions to each list, noting what you might like to add to your gallery of daily-happiness-type pleasures…”

Never sign off on those lists. Keep ‘em open… “do some experiments…. Talk to neighbors… Inspire a young person… When someone says that ‘they’ have now got [happiness] figured out, you may say aloud or in your head, ‘No, they probably don’t.’”

But on the other hand, here are some “activities so good that they need no arguments or fanfare: being loving to your spouse, nurturing your children, tending to your extended family, nurturing friendships, helping local strangers, helping strangers far away, caring for animals, engaging in fine art and the arts of living (poetry, prose, painting, sculpture, music, dance, architecture, cooking, entertaining, gardening, decor), risking both being in the world and keeping apart, doing philosophy, learning the art of traveling and the art of staying home, planning for the future of humanity, and increasing the world’s knowledge.”

And this, again:

Also remember to take time for paradise, too. (Sorry, commissioner, I know a Yankees championship was not your idea of heaven. But it won’t last forever.*)

How many days ’til Spring Training?

==

* “I need to think something lasts forever, and it might as well be that state of being that is a game; it might as well be that, in a green field, in the sun.” -A.B.G.

Justice

Our chapter on this large theme  starts slow but then delivers a solid point too often neglected by partisans of free-market democracy: “In a good society, there will be something more than prosperity; there will also be justice.”

Dr. King’s dream is a step closer, segregation is no longer defended by “respectable” people, there’s a Caucasian-African-American in the Oval Office… but bigotry and ugly race-hatred still frustrate the full flourishing of a genuinely Good Society, a Kantian Kingdom of Ends, a republic of virtue, a land of liberty and justice for all.

“No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until ‘justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream’… I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today!”

Philosopher Cornel West is one of our more charismatic and energetic dream-keepers today, a “drum major for justice” in books like Race Matters and in pop culture venues (like musical recordings and film) where academics rarely tread.  It’s his tireless theme (check all the references to justice in the Cornel West Reader, for instance.) “Who wants to be well-adjusted to injustice? What kind of human being do you want to be?”

Here he is, in a snippet from the film “Examined Life,” talking about philosophy, democracy, and some of the reigning impediments to justice in our time.

“From each according to his abilities; to each according to his needs.” The Marxist conception of justice, so summarized, sounds eminently fair. But perhaps fairness doesn’t unleash the incentives required by those who will work only for more than they need.  Do the industriously rich sometimes deserve it, earn it by the sweat of their brows and the cleverness of their entrepreneurial or inventive skills? No question, there have been benefactors  as well as malefactors of great wealth– sometimes wrapped up in the same skin– from Carnegie and Rockefeller to Gates and Buffett.

John Rawls‘ 1971 classic A Theory of Justice, a modern version of the old social contract approach to political philosophy, explores fairness behind a “veil of ignorance,” the “original position” we should supposedly want rational contractarians  to occupy when deliberating principles of justice. (This is not quite the traditional sense in which justice is supposed to be blind, but it’s related.) It asks: what principles of social justice would be chosen by parties thoroughly knowledgeable about human affairs in general but wholly deprived—by the “veil of ignorance”—of information about the particular person or persons they represent?

Rawls thought they’d pick these two: (1) fundamental  individual equality, allowing (2) only those inequalities that can be presumed to work out to everyone’s advantage.

Rawlsian procedural justice raises this challenge: can we be motivated to think constructively about justice, or anything else, if we’re supposed to be ignorant of the most pertinent details of our personal identities (vocation, income, party allegiance, et al)? Would we still be capable of mustering a King- or West-like passion for justice, behind Rawls’ veil? Robert Solomon is among those who’ve raised this worry, rightly I think. Rawls was more concerned with securing the dispassion, the detachment necessary to unleash our full commitment to the common good undistracted by private self-interest.

There must be a connection between this question and the vexing issue of psychological continuity and personal identity that I’m trying to be lucid about by Saturday. Possibly it’s something to do with the forward-looking , prospective nature of both the contractarian approach to justice and the continuity of persons.

In a word, might it be our vision of the future that both impels the march for justice and unifies the self?

 

Bodies

Jennifer Hecht is right, Descartes was wrong: you are not in your body, you are your body. So it really matters what you put into it, how much you work it and with what frequency, and with whom you allow it to mingle.

Moderation in all matters of the flesh (and spirit) has most often been the conventional wisdom, descending from Aristotle, Epicurus, and the Buddha among many others. Balance is good, excess is not, is the message. “Extremely yin things”– sugar, euphoric drugs, and high-proof spirits, intemperance, licentiousness, promiscuity–  will throw your yang all out of whack.

Then again, most of us– unlike many philosophers– “enjoy having something new to believe in, and find cycles of excess and self-denial easier than constant moderation. Clearly, there are pleasures at the extremes.” Can we be moderate extremists and extreme moderates? I’m up for trying.

There’s lots of funny stuff in the “Eating” chapter, like Mr. Kellogg’s virtuous whole grains and their attendant regimens, and the “fletcherizing” craze, perfect for Victorians who romanticize effort for its own sake.

I do have a problem with Hecht’s seeming eagerness to ditch exercise, and her glib “of course you don’t want to” do it. “Some eras prefer martinis.” I love “Mad Men” too, martinis do have their place– usually alongside smokes and sexist banter– but not in this version:

But to her credit, Hecht quickly notes that the Greeks saw exercise and mens sana in corpore sano as indispenable to happiness. They were pretty smart. But I’m glad “gymnasia” no longer means “to exercise naked.” Some things are better left to the imagination.

Hecht has it in for treadmills especially. “Rageless, we strain against machines.” I agree, it’s always better to strain in fresh air and sunshine; and better still not to strain too much at all. Exercise does not have to be painful, to be good.  The runner Jim Fixx keeled over at 52. Moderate walking (depending on how you define “moderate”) is good enough for me– can in fact be magical, holiday-inducing, even ecstatic. But a half-hour on the cross-trainer, stair-stepper, and, yes, the treadmill, can be fun too. “If you like it, great.” Spoken like a pluralist.

And in principle I also agree that “we would all be better off if we did unproductive exercise only for pleasure… we should walk somewhere we have to go to anyway… take the stairs… chop the wood… Forget the gym unless you love it.” In January and February I do love it. You don’t? That’s cool.

I’m still not moved, though, by the observation that “in the context of most of human history, our idea that a good life includes a lot of physical exercise is bizarre.” In that context, freedom and human rights and the integrity of personal conscience are also bizarre.  So?

But, truce: “many of us make ourselves happy by not exercising.” Fine, have another Krispy Kreme and forget about it. There’s no such thing as “stress,” and “fit” and “attractive” are mostly on the inside. Right?

And sex is in the head too, they say.

But for a guy supposed to be “against sex,” old Kellogg sure disseminated some interesting, point-specific information (see “Massage of the Special Regions”), as did Kinsey (“angry about the sexual repression of the world in which he had been raised”). It matters when you live, sure. But how still matters more. Sixties-style “free love” was over-rated, the sexual revolution was phallo-centric… but monogamy has its issues too. What to do?

Hecht won’t tell you. “Our beliefs about what we ought to be doing are far too heavy-handed,” but– here’s the good news– “our era allows more room for happiness through sexuality than average.”

On the other hand, “there is a kind of boring silence about sex.” Really? Here in the U.S.A., in our popular media, on the Internet, on network and cable? I hate to sound like a fogey, but if this is what silence sounds like I’m not sure I’d vote for more chatter.

“The great historical happiness treatment is the water cure.” We visited the old Roman baths, in Bath, England a few years ago. Impressive, ingenious, civilized, decadent… but no guarantee of happiness, unless water treatment just happens to be your peculiar thing. Isn’t that, in fact, the emerging consensus of our course so far? No guarantees, to each her own, and hands off one another’s things.

And (as we’ll read next time): it’s really  important to create occasions  for celebration.

Speaking of which (I almost forgot): it’s November, the World Series is nearly through, and the holiday season looms like a dark cloud. Hecht offers a timely baseball benediction that may just carry me through to Spring Training, noting its early popularity “as a source of ‘fresh air and friendship– two things which are of all others most effective for promoting happiness.’” Amen, sister.

Nietzschean consolation

With friends like this… “To those who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities– I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished.”

Thus spake Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), inevitably evoking the oft-repeated cliche that is in fact an accurate rendition of his main conviction: “what doesn’t kill me” etc. Thanks a lot, Fritz. (As a young grad student I considered myself a friend of Nietzsche, for a time, before sobering up from his distinctive brew of “will to power” and discovering better brands.)  It will surprise no one to learn that he had few close friends, during a life that consumed itself in self-serious, self-absorbed,  self-aggrandizing, self-conscious, finally self-parodying intensity. At the end (a dozen years before his death) he was writing things like Ecce Homo, “Why I am so wise, so clever, write such good books” etc., and it’s not clear all or even most of the late vainglory can be blamed on his syphilitically-deranged brain. It pretty clearly cannot be.

If we’re known by the company we keep, it is instructive to notice the company of self-avowed Nietzscheans. (Yes, this borders the ad hominem, but our boy would understand.) It includes a disproportionate number of brilliant but misanthropic types obsessed with their legacy, contemptuous of their contemporaries, certain they’d be appreciated by the ages, neglectful of the domestic side of life. Richard Wagner, H.L. Mencken and  Ayn Rand are names that pop instantly to mind. (It also includes Nazis. They misread him, of course. But if a Nazi were going to misread a philosopher, he’d be the one.) No such thing as a Nietzschean? ‘Fraid so.

But perhaps he wasn’t dead wrong when he criticized Christians, Kantians, Utilitarians and everyone else he perceived to be in service of ease  instead of the strenuous, difficult life from which he was convinced we gain the most. Fewer couches and beer and remote controls, more mountains to climb. (Doesn’t have quite the ring of “A yes, a no, a straight line, a goal,” but the thought is much the same.)

“If you refuse to let your own suffering lie upon you for even an hour and if you constantly try to prevent and forestall all possible distress… then it is clear that [you harbor in your heart] the religion of comfortableness. How little you know of human happiness…” You can’t be happy if you’re not prepared to suffer for it. Another cliche will not be denied here: “no pain, no gain.”

Alain de Botton: according to Nietzsche, “we all become Christians when we profess indifference to what we secretly long for but do not have; when we blithely say that we do not need love or a position in the world, money or success, creativity or health– while the corners of our mouths twitch with bitterness; and we wage silent wars against what we have publicly renounced.” On this scale, then, didn’t Nietzsche (the preacher’s kid) maintain a life-long flirtation with Christianity too?

“How would Nietzsche have preferred us to approach  our setbacks? To continue to believe in what we wish for, even when we do not have it, and may never… Resist the temptation to denigrate and declare evil cerain goods because they have proved hard to secure.” If you just invert the terms “good and evil,” you’re not beyond them.

Here’s the great sadness  and tragedy of this solitary mountain philosopher’s life: he admired Epicurus , especially the Epicurean idea that happiness involves a life among friends. He really cut himself off, at the end of that trail. He never had the pleasure of a weekend packed with trick-or-treating,  Krispy Kreme-ing and dog-parking with a joyous 10-year old, World Series viewing,  etc. The quotidian did not map onto his “straight line” to the summit.

Too bad for him, even if good for those who are glad he wrote those books. But isn’t it selfish not to wish he’d been capable of  a more conventional happiness?

So if you go to dwell in the upper regions, be sure to keep in touch with your lowland pals.

Sunday morning

“Sunday morning,” for me, used to be the beginning of a phrase that had to end “with Charles Kuralt.” The late CBS newsman’s warm, calming, avuncular friendliness under the studio klieg lights, as he narrated and introduced arts and “human interest” segments deemed generally too un-newsworthy for Walter’s or Dan’s consideration, became my Sunday services. The Unitarians couldn’t hold a candle to him.

Before Kuralt came to Sunday Morning, though, he was “On the Road” with cameraman Izzy Bleckman… who told Bob Edwards all about it during one of my morning commutes last week. There’s a new DVD anthology of their travels just out. I gave my Dad the VHS collection a few years ago, he and I differed on many aspects of the American heritage but we had Kuralt in common.

Kuralt borrowed just the right words, Clarence Day’s, to bid viewers adieu and pass the baton to Charles Osgood in April 1994. He was gone for good just three years later, a couple months shy of his 63d birthday.

Farewell, my friends — farewell and hail! I’m off to seek the Holy Grail. I cannot tell you why. Remember, please, when I am gone, ’Twas Aspiration led me on. Tiddlely-widdley tootle-oo, All I want is to stay with you, But here I go.  Good-bye.

Boo!

A student asked what I think of Halloween. What’s not to love about a holiday devoted to dressing up and hoarding candy? And some great costumes came to class yesterday. Fun!

I don’t think much, however, of the Halloween-deniers for whom “Satanic” denotes something real and menacing.   Scaring the hell out of small children is not cool.  But millennia of humans have done and continue to do precisely that, with baseless terrorizing tales of eternal torment. That’s why there are so many adult hell-raisers still abroad in the 21st century.

This form of child abuse, like all the others, is a blind, unexamined, self-perpetuating cycle that’s been repeated generation after uncritical generation. It needs to stop.

But Halloween’s still OK. Trick or treat!

James bio – 8

It’s the autumn of ‘86, the Statue of Liberty’s just been dedicated in New York Harbor, and James is immersed in the writing of his seminal Principles of Psychology.

But he’s also doing and thinking about many other things. He’s exploring hypnosis and other “exceptional mental states” (again, check out his incredible free-form channeling of Hegel under the intoxicating influence of nitrous oxide).

He and Alice are building a home at 95 Irving Street in Cambridge, near Harvard, and renovating their Chocorua,  New Hampshire getaway (reducing to just eleven “doors opening out”).

He’s exploring the evolutionary implications of human instinct and will.

He’s getting better acquainted with colleague George Santayana, beginning to turn Harvard’s philosophy program into something very special, and becoming a legendary teacher.

And he’s about to reunite in Europe with his beloved, mysteriously troubled sister Alice. Busy days.

“Actively involved with both family and students, redesigning and rebuilding one home and designing and building another from scratch– all while finishing a book almost three thousand pages long in manuscript– William James was constructing his life with all the energy he had.” A time of career achievement, and a time of  warm and cozy domesticity. (That’s his Irving Street study on the left, and Chocorua on the right.) James seems comfortably at home in his universe.

And at last, on the eve of the Gay ’90s, Principles is finished. James is much too hard on himself and his book, “a loathsome, distended, tumefied, bloated, dropsial mass.” In fact, most psychology experts continue to regard it as a classic and a work of genius. But he was ready for something completely different.

(Note: in August 2010 the William James Society will commemorate the centenary of James’s death in the Chocorua house in 1910. But  in our narrative, of course, he’s not dead yet.)

Money

“Everybody knows that money doesn’t buy happiness.”

The Series has begun, please indulge my pet metaphor: Jennifer Hecht’s next pitch rides up and in, crowding “Everybody” with the retort that smart philosophers “really don’t all say this.”

Aristotle, for instance, acknowledged that happiness “requires a degree of comfort.” But only a small degree, “abundance does not correlate with happiness” to anywhere near the degree that poverty correlates with unhappiness.

It’s commonly, winkingly noted that the roots of our material culture in America run from Jefferson’s “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” back to John Locke’s “life, liberty, and property (estate).” The insinuation is that Jefferson was importing a crass idea under cover of a pretty, idealized euphemism.

Less often acknowledged, and much more intriguing, is Jefferson’s Epicureanism. He admired its naturalism– he so despised supernaturalism that he snipped those parts out of his Bible– its  secularism, and its happy vision of simple, virtuous pleasure. “Epicurus ran a coed, hedonistic philosopher’s retreat called the Garden,” encouraged serious reflection for its own sake, and valued personal freedom and independence above institutions, congregations, and confederations.

For his part, Jefferson valued his own “garden” at Monticello– a commune-like compound, staffed by slaves who we now know were as good as family, if not quite accorded the status and dignity of friendly equals in the Epicurean sense. But we also now know that money was a problem for him, too. He sold his books to create the library of congress, not only as a public-spirited act of generosity but because he really needed the dough.

Hecht: “There are obvious happiness advantages to having some money,” and not only for those with little. “The difference between a phenomenal wheelchair and one that is just good enough is not trivial.” Nor, during the Series, is the difference between an ordinary TV and a crisp-&-pretty hi-def model.

But let’s not get carried away. The road to hell is paved with obsessive, self-righteous  monomania.